[fpc-devel] property syntax extension

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On 10/18/07, Paul Ishenin <webpirat at mail.ru> wrote:
> The bad thing that this will not work. I am developer Felipe, not
> technical writer. I dont know how to write helps and moreover I will not
> write them.

I actually consider that what you wish to achieve *is* documentation.
You desire to pass more information to the user of LCL then what is on
the function parameters and other code parts.

This information can be: Works on the following widgetsets: X, Y, Z

But it could also be anything else desired.

Some code documentation systems work by parsing comments which go in
the source code itself, like javadoc, and that would probably make
things easier for you as you don't need to leave the code editor to
add documentation information, and shows an advantage of this
documentation system.

If we were using such a system we could have a comment like this:

{Function X

  Description: blablabla

  Widgetsets: win32 wince

}
function x()
begin
....

I always liked the comments in-code approach a lot better, but I doubt
that we will change now.

Particularly lazarus uses lazde to edit the documentation, which is in
XML files that can be outputed into HTML files. It's not particularly
easy to work with.

The help is already integrated into the object inspector, pressing F1
shows (or attempts to) show a url with the respective docs. From there
we could extract the widgetset information or anything else and then
it can be shown this in whatever way desired.

If our current documentation system is too hard an alternative idea
would be adding a hint to the IDE on the code.

Maybe:

procedure MethodX; {%widgetsets win32 wince}

This should be quicker and easier to implement then extending the ppu files.

thanks,
-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho